alt Hacker NewsIt’s funny how the one time it has ever happened that someone wielded a chainsaw on the subway it’s memorable news, and becomes evidence of a narrative that all of public transit is ‘sketchy’. That article’s from 7 years ago, and nobody got hurt and the guy was arrested. (BTW, I wonder why they used a photo from 2009?)
In the mean time, the number of shooting deaths by private car drivers in the US has more than doubled since 2018, to more than 1 per day. That doesn’t count threats with other weapons, nor any other kind of road rage, nor does it count accidental crashes. There are more than 120 deaths per day in the US in cars (the vast majority of “private transit”), and more than 2 million ER visits by injured riders per year.
And public transit is sketchy? Not compared to driving cars it isn’t.
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Fairly recently: https://nypost.com/2025/04/15/us-news/cause-of-death-still-a...
A man died while riding the train, one person robbed the corpse, then another had sex with it..
As an outsider (Australian) living in the USA there's non stop propaganda for anything that could make a dollar if privatised. To the extent that many don't believe public run systems can function at all.
Anything disparaging public transit is played up to the extend even sitcoms will have disparaging scenes that are essentially "you took public transport? Are you poor?". The tax system is basically privatised, it's a pain to do anything without paying for tax software now with a lot of lobbying and propaganda that it's the only way. A lot of US citizens actually seem to believe that anything government run is inefficient (despite the lack of academic data on this) and demand the dismantling of all government institutions (see DOGE). Even utilities are often privatized with no competition (you just pay what you're told).
It's a bit crazy coming from a country where i had fibre internet at my regional home (the recently rolled out national broadband network) which is faster than the best connection i can get in the middle of silicon valley, i had affordable public transit with a universal tap on/off card that worked for all of them so no change/cash needed. Universal healthcare. A free online tax system that would start pre-filled by the numbers my employer+stockbroker entered in, i just had to quickly check through any federal or state specific exemptions i might qualify for. Etc.
Like it's madness the level of propaganda for this viewpoint that privatization is better and it's blatant why that propaganda is there - you privatize something essential like healthcare and you can leach vast amounts of money from everyone.
To this day my home country pays a fraction of US salaries yet the median wealth per capita is more than double the USA (Australia's 261k wealth per capita vs USAs 112k wealth per capita) since we don't get leached at every turn by privatized essential services. Yet in the USA they are clamouring for more of this as if that makes them wealthier.